Social psych exam- game time!!!!!

Social influence: the direct effects that words, actions of others have on our own thoughts, feelings, behaviors

Construal: the way people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

Fundamental attribution error: tendency to explain others behavior in terms of personality and not situation

Behaviorism: in order to understand behavior, we should look at the reinforcing properties of the environment

Gestalt psychology: we should study the way things are subjectively perceived as a whole, as opposed to an objective sum of parts

b=f(p,e): behavior is a function of personality and environment

Naive realism: construal w conviction that we perceive things exactly as they are without any bias

Self esteem motive: the need to protect self esteem

Social cognition motive: the need to be accurate

Social cognition: how people select, interpret, remember, and use information to make judgements and decisions

Ethnography: researchers attempt to understand a group by experiencing it from the inside without preconceived notions

Archival analysis: researchers study the accumulated documents to understand a group

Extraneous variable: variable that accounts for correlation between two variables

Internal validity v external validity: keeping everything expect the independent variable the same v being able to generalize findings of the study to an entire population

Replications: ultimate test of external validity

Basic v applied research: research done to find answers v research done to find solutions

Availabilty v representative heuristic: how quickly something comes to mind v how it fits into a categorization of a sample

Attribution theory: explains how people assign causes to behaviors

Covariation model: harold kelley’s model on how people make attributions depending on consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness

Bias blind spot: belief that others are more susceptible to attribution errors than us

Independent vs interdependent view of self: defining ourselves either in terms of our own thoughts and feelings or in terms of our relationship with others

Self awareness theory: when we look inwards, we compare our actions to our morals

Causal theories: theories of what causes our own behavior

Self perception theory: when feelings are ambiguous, we look to our behaviors to understand ourselves

Two factor theory of emotion: we first experience physiological arousal, then we find a cognitive explanation

Implementation intentions: specific plans on when, how, and where to complete goals

Impression management: controlling how we are perceived by others

Theory of planned behavior: planned behavior can be predicted by intention, which is made up of three components (specificity of attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control)

Yale attitude change approach: who, what, to whom

Elaboration likelihood model: central v peripheral route to persuasion

​​Heuristic systematic model of persuasion: when taking the peripheral route, people use emotional heuristics (feel good = yes, feel bad = no)

Reactance theory: when people feel their freedom is being threatened, they resist against persuasive messages and the undesired behavior occurs at a higher rate

Three ways to reduce dissonance: change behavior, change attitude, add new cognition

External v internal justification: reducing cognitive dissonance by justifying using situation and environment vs changing ones inner beliefs

Insufficient punishment: dissonance aroused when individuals lack sufficient external justification for resisting temptations, leading to devaluation of temptation

Hypocrisy induction: creating dissonance by having students aware of a certain behavior, then of their conflicting attitude, to create change in behavior

Self affirmation theory: idea that people can reduce threats to self esteem with certain topics by reassuring themselves in other areas

Self evaluation maintenance theory: people experience dissonance in a relationship if we are close to the person, they are outperforming us, and the task is central to our self esteem

Social impact theory: idea that conforming to normative influence depends on group’s importance, immediacy, and number of people in the group

Idiosyncracy credits: conforming to group norms over time allows an individual to deviate from the norm from time to time

Injunctive v descriptive norms: how people perceive others will react towards an action with their attitude v their actual actions

“Boomerang effect”: there are individuals who perform behaviors above average and those who perform behaviors below average; those who receive messages and are below average might be tempted to engage in behavior MORE

Consonant cognitions: come up with rationalizations, often easiest route

Low balling v foot in the door: withholding information to get people to agree v asking two separate favors with the second being more likely to get the person to say yes

Social facilitation v social loafing: tendency for individuals to do worse/ better when perceived by others v tendency to do worse when feeling loss of individuality

Coordination loss v process loss: group effort being worse than individual effort due to deindividuation v problem solving inhibited due to group

Transactive memory: combined memory of group more efficient than memory of individuals

Contingency theory of leadership: idea that leadership effectiveness depends on how task or relationship oriented the leader is, and amount of control leader has over group

Social exchange theory: everything we do is to maximize rewards and minimize costs

Empathy altruism hypothesis: when we feel empathy for another person, we will attempt to help that person for purely altruistic reasons, regardless of what we have to gain

Bystander intervention decision tree: five steps that describe how people decide whether to intervene in an emergency (notice, interpret, assume responsibility, know how to help, decide to implement help)

Implicit association test: measures speed of people’s positive and negative associations with target groups to measure implicit prejudice

Social identity threat: threat elicited when people perceive themselves as being representative members of a group instead of their own individual, reducing cognitive resources and impeding ability to do well

Social identity theory: part of person's self concept is based on identification with a certain group

Ethnocentrism: belief that one’s own culture is superior to others

Ingroup bias v outgroup homogeneity: preference for members of own group v overestimating likeness of outgroup

Realistic conflict theory: limited resources lead to conflict between groups, leading to prejudice and discrimination

Contact hypothesis and extended contact effect: knowing members of outgroup decreases prejudice, and simply knowing a member of ingroup has contact with a member of outgroup also decreases prejudice

4 conditions to reduce prejudice: equal status, common goal, intergroup cooperation, supported by law or social norms

Expectancy confirmation: expectations from stereotypes are not necessarily valid in and of themselves, people will tend to seek out confirmatory evidence

Hostile sexism v benevolent sexism: traditional v beliefs that women are “less than” disguised by positive attributes